India’s wealthy aborting girls at alarming rate
Lancet study shows sex ratio as low as 750 girls to 1000 boys among India’s richest 20%
Young Indian women walk past a billboard in New Delhi on July 9, 2010, encouraging the birth of girls. Mostly as a result of sex-selective abortion, India is one of the few countries worldwide with an adverse child sex ratio in favour of boys. Under Indian law, tests to find out the gender of an unborn baby are illegal if not done for medical reasons, but the practice continues in what activists say is a flourishing multi-million-dollar business. Girls in India are often considered a liability, as parents have to put away large sums of money for dowries at the time of their marriage.
Rising incomes and education levels are not doing anything to help the gender ratio in India, where parents choose to abort unborn girls and try again for a boy, reports the Hindustan Times.
According to a new study published in the medical journal Lancet, the problem may be even worse than indicated by the latest Indian census — which showed the gender ratio had dropped to its lowest levels since India gained its independence from Britain in 1947, the paper said.
While the census showed the sex ratio has dropped to 914 girls to 1000 boys overall, the Lancet study found that the sex ratio for second-born children in families where the first-born is a girl has dropped from 906 girls per 1000 boys in 1990 to 836 in 2005, the paper said.
Worse, the same second-child ratio has fallen to around 750 girls for 1000 boys among the richest 20% families, and to barely above 700 for families where the mother has over 10 years of education, the paper said.
“Since the proportion of the rich and educated is likely to rise in India, we are worried about the implications of this trend,” the paper quoted lead researcher Prabhat Jha, from the University of Toronto and the Centre for Global Health Research, as saying.